


Projection

by BeeDaily



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-02-09
Updated: 2009-02-09
Packaged: 2019-01-19 05:48:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12404295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BeeDaily/pseuds/BeeDaily
Summary: "Sometimes–though especially at Christmas time–a bloke couldn't help but feel a bit sorry for Harry Potter." (Written for the 2008 Holiday Fic Exchange)





	Projection

**Author's Note:**

> Note from ChristyCorr, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [Unknowable Room](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Unknowable_Room), a Harry Potter archive active from 2005-2016. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project after May 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [Unknowable Room collection profile](http://www.archiveofourown.org/collections/unknowableroom).

_"Are you familiar with the psychological term 'projection?'"_

_______________________________

Sometimes—though especially at Christmas time—a bloke couldn't help but feel a bit sorry for Harry Potter.

It wasn't obvious, wasn't something palpable or particularly tangible. It wasn't a scar on a forehead or a few tufts of brightly coloured hair, out there for the whole world to see. A person looked at Harry Potter and didn't automatically think pity. Who could? Who would? Because maybe he looked happy. Maybe he looked healthy. Maybe that's all that should have mattered. But it wasn't, not really— _he_ wasn't, not really. These people, they couldn't possibly understand. They wouldn't ever realise that Harry Potter could never be whole, couldn't ever be complete.

Because at the end of the day—no matter what he does, or who he is, or who he becomes—Harry Potter is still an orphan.

It's during everyone's favourite holiday season that the incompleteness becomes particularly poignant, becomes heavy and clear and unavoidable. There's just something about the air, the music, the decorations, the spirit of Christmas that makes the void inside crack open more than usual. This is when it hurts, when the empty spot inside becomes a sore—a slow, pulsing twitch of pain that can jump out and catch him unawares at any moment. It's then that his smiles have to shine the brightest, his laughter has to ring the loudest. No one sees the cracks inside if he's cracking smiles outside. It took a while to learn that. Harry's had a while.

Christmas means family.

Harry Potter has no family.

No. No, that's not all true. Harry _does_ have a family—a great one, even, and it's not that he's discounting them. Maybe the first part of his life wasn't so wonderful—an aunt and uncle who abused him weren't exactly the warm and loving environment that a child needed—but maybe that didn't matter as much as people say. Because even if Harry _did_ have that sort of support, that sort of caring upbringing—like say he had a relative, a grandparent or something, who loved him more than words could say and dotted on him and lived for him almost to a point of unbearable extremity...would that have made a difference? She would be wonderful and important and _there_...but so would the void. It's not something that can be filled with substitutes. Harry must wonder if other people realise that. Often it seems like they don't.

Harry was not unwanted. He is not living in a state of such self-pity that he doesn't know that. There were—are—plenty of people who wanted him, who were or would have been proud to call him family. The Weasleys for one, who never seemed to realise that their family didn't need yet another new addition, and in fact welcomed such stragglers as if they were one of their very own. Harry had had a godfather, as well. A godfather who, by all accounts, had never failed to be there for him when he could. He was the one who told him stories of those two elusive figures that should have been the most concrete of all, who tried to make a home for him, whose guidance was always first sought and never refused. Harry's godfather had died, as well, of course, but sometimes that didn't happen. Sometimes such people didn't leave. Sometimes they were always there, for better or worse. Connections built between such people, threads of common love and perhaps common disaster, which proved unbreakable. Sometimes these people became as close to a family as a void-filled boy could expect.

Yes, Harry has family. He has a family whom he loves and who love him right back. They are the weights that keep the void from taking over completely, the glue that hold his broken pieces together. He reminds himself of that all the time. He tells himself that he's lucky, that he could quite literally have no one, not a single person in this whole world, and that he should be thankful that all he's missing are his two most important pieces instead of every single one. But then he thinks about that phrase—all he's missing are his two most important pieces—and wonders if a body can function without such pieces. Sometimes it feels like it can. Other times...well, there are other times.

War heroes. That's what everyone calls them. They tell him that they saved lives as if that's supposed to make him feel better, as if the fact that others are living because they're not should make up for the fact that they're dead, not here with him. They show him pictures and tell him stories as if these figures that they're conjuring up are people he should recognise instead of simply another faded ghost that hangs about the void. Sometimes they make him feel better. Other times...well, there are other times.

There are always other times.

Every so often, it feels like there aren't, though. There are moments when he can forget, when for a second, the void is closed and happiness filters in and he can ignore for a time that he's not a whole person. Those times are nice and they're usually when he's with his family. For an orphan, Harry does have a lot of family, actually. Sometimes it seems like the fates were trying to compensate for something, giving him all these people since they'd taken away the two most important ones. It should balance out—sometimes he supposes that it does—but then the other times roll back in and the void cracks open and the cycle begins again.

He knows that a bloke could do worse than the Weasleys. As far as families go—surrogate or otherwise—the Weasleys are pretty much the best the magical world has to offer. Not everyone has an Arthur Weasley, there for a kind word or a smile. Not everyone has a Molly, with her food and her sweaters and her motherly ways. There's George to catch a laugh, and Percy for help with homework, and Charlie for a tale of daring and adventure. They took in a small boy without question, made him family. Of course, Harry had married into that family, made it official.

That was an interesting thought.

Maybe Ginny was what made Harry forget most about the void. Love could do that to a man. It wasn't hard to love Ginny, and she was never one to hold her love back. She was the sort of witch who was always there, never letting you down. The sort of witch who would give up a career she loved to take care of her children—even children who, technically, weren't hers at all. She was the sort of witch who would take your hand and hold it tight the first time you stepped onto that fated train platform, terrified at eleven-years-old, all the while pretending that it was _her_ who didn't want to let go. She was the sort of witch who would stay up past midnight helping you bake cupcakes when you suddenly decided to celebrate your birthday on a balmy Monday in July rather than in late April, when you were actually born. And that next morning, as you were all sitting eating the cupcakes, she would smile at you and sing "Happy Birthday", and you'd be sure that you've never not felt the void more in your entire life.

Yes, Ginny helped with the void. She helped more than most. That was probably why Harry married her. Weasley women made it seem like that void wasn't so big, wasn't so consuming. Harry always said that there was something about Weasley women, something special. That couldn't be argued. A Weasley woman _was_ special. The sort of girl who could be your best friend for your entire life, then one fated Christmas during your fifth-year, give you an innocent kiss under some conveniently placed mistletoe, giggling the whole thing off and waltzing away, never knowing that she took your void-filled heart with her.

Yes, a Weasley woman was special.

More compensation, probably, though a bloke never seemed to think about that when she was near. Didn't need to. The void wasn't there when she was. Convenient.

It's at Christmas when Harry must go to that inescapable wall, the one that was put up just after the void was created, the one that stood tall and proud and unbreakable on the grounds of Hogwarts. He goes and he traces their names with his finger, the cold marble meeting his shaking hand and steadying it. It's there that maybe he sits for awhile, where he sits on the cold, snowy ground and talks to a monument as if it were two real people, ignoring the fact that anyone who passes by must think he's mad, completely out of his mind. Perhaps he is. Perhaps the void has affected his brain, as well. Sitting there, he doesn't care. He talks and talks—about school, about his family, about the Weasley woman and the fact that he has suspicions about whether she is in love with her latest boyfriend as much as she claims, judging by the fact that she kissed him again that past week, with no mistletoe in sight. He talks about loss and about unfairness and about compensation. Sometimes he talks about the void. He wonders if they feel it, too, wherever they are. The wall doesn't answer, but he doesn't expect it to.

It's hard.

It's _so_ hard.

Sometimes he lashes out at the wall. He takes the Christmas wreath he's brought and tosses it as hard as he can against the inscriptions, against all he has left of them. His hair turns a light brown, his eyes blaze a hard grey, and he thinks about how his professor told him today that he is growing to look more and more like his father each day. This shouldn't make him angry, but it does. So he considers transfiguring a sharp object— _any_ sharp object—and scraping at their names until they're no longer visible, until they're as nonexistent as their human counterparts. He thinks long and hard about this, and then he sits back down in the snow and he cries. He cries so hard that he can barely breathe, can barely think, can barely feel anything except for the void, the emptiness and the hollowness and the fact that he is a boy without parents. Without anything.

He wonders if his parents are proud of him. He wonders if they think of him. Everyone says that they died _for_ him, but that's hard to imagine, hard to accept.

He wonders if, given the choice, they would choose saving the world over him again.

He wonders if it's fair to blame them.

He wonders if he should blame himself.

He wonders if any of it matters, because no matter what choices are made, where the blame is placed, his parents are still dead. They're not coming back.

This is done in private, of course, all of it. Harry has too much pride to let it be otherwise. It's kept behind a façade, behind his own stone wall of feelings and hurt and truth. A defense mechanism, above all else. He has a few of those. He needs them. He holds them. Letting go is not an option. If he lets go, the void wins, and if the void wins, Harry sinks. He doesn't want to sink.

Yeah, sometimes a bloke couldn't help but feel a bit sorry for Harry Potter. But Teddy figured that sometimes, that was just the way of it.


End file.
